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Azure Elastic Database jobs is now in public preview

We are excited to announce the availability of a new, significantly upgraded public preview release of Azure Elastic Database jobs. Elastic Database jobs is now a fully Azure-hosted service. Unlike the earlier, customer-hosted and managed version of Elastic Database jobs, this version is an integral part of Azure with no additional services or components to install and configure. This release also adds significant capabilities making it easy for customers to automate and execute T-SQL jobs using PowerShell, REST, or T-SQL APIs against a group of databases. These jobs can be used to handle a wide variety of tasks such as index rebuilding, schema updates, collection of query results for analytics, and performance monitoring.

Imagine you are a SaaS developer in the cloud offering online ordering services for a collection of large stores. To support this and allow unlimited scale, you’ve provisioned separate Azure SQL databases to handle each store’s business, and this set of databases share a common schema. While your application directs customer transactions to the appropriate store’s databases, you want the capability to easily manage all databases jointly to ensure the performance and customer experience remain optimal. Additionally, you periodically have new schema to deploy to each database in preparation for a new feature you are planning to integrate into your application for your customers.

As new customers are added or dropped, additional databases need to be created or dropped without you having to change your maintenance job scripts. Azure Elastic Database jobs allow you to achieve all this and more using your familiar T-SQL based job scripts. These jobs can be scheduled, run, managed, and monitored using T-SQL, PowerShell, REST APIs, and the Azure portal. This updated version of Elastic Database jobs provides all these capabilities and adds significant additional features.

Some of the features and enhancements in this release include:

Elastic Database jobs is now a fully integrated Azure service.

Jobs can target databases in one or more Azure SQL elastic pools, logical servers, shard maps, and across multiple subscriptions.

Jobs can be composed of multiple steps to customize the execution sequence.

List of target databases in the target groups are dynamically enumerated. Any databases added or dropped from the target group are automatically picked up without having to make explicit job script changes.

Jobs can be configured to limit the number of databases a job runs against in parallel to ensure resource optimization.

Target groups can be customized with “include” or “exclude” references for specific databases, pools, or servers.

T-SQL, PowerShell, REST APIs, and Azure portal support.

Azure Elastic Database jobs makes automation of database maintenance and management across a large number of databases simpler and reliable. Our tutorial walks you through the necessary steps to create and execute jobs over a group of databases, as well as to create schedules, execute jobs, and store the results. Elastic Database jobs can perform operations on databases in all service tiers of Azure SQL Database.